If there’s one thing that has stayed a constant in Tarun Tahiliani’s vast body of work, it is the drape. Three decades of Tahiliani’s runways have seen certain range—belted brocade dresses in the late ’90s, pearl-embroidered, chantilly-lace everything in the 2000s, leather bandhgalas and audacious hemlines in the 2010s, embellished mukaish saris and hand-painted sherwanis of the 2020s, among only a few thousand others. But an iconic drape is always to be found amongst them: whether it’s front and centre in a low-slung, unembellished vermillion silk sari, or tucked beneath a behemoth, bejewelled cummerbund on a fluid, marigold-hued skirt and dupatta.
“As a boy, I was just drawn to the glamour of the women around me,” Tahiliani says. There was an appreciation for the classic, inimitable beauty of the Indian woman of his childhood, even if it didn’t automatically translate into a burning need to design at the time. “They were beyond alluring; they enjoyed dressing up, the jewels, the draping… that’s why the draped form became such an important part of everything I do. It’s the one thing I grew up with. It was like classical Greek sculpture—the human form, draped in marble.”
Tahiliani is one of the original household names in Indian fashion, and a glance at his career graph (or his 2023 coffee table book Tarun Tahiliani: Journey to India Modern) is quick proof of how he became one. The official start of this journey was the cofounding of Ensemble, the country’s first multi-designer boutique, in 1987, with his wife Sailaja, which set the tone for the designer as an early bastion of luxury designer retail. But Tahiliani has a refreshing response to being asked if he was drawn to design as a young boy. “When I went to college in America, I hadn’t even realised there was a fashion industry. Or at least, I wasn’t aware that I was aware,” he laughs.
He adds that, like it does with a lot of designers, it started with his mother. “She was an engineer, but she also used to model—she was unabashed and there were all these glamorous images of her.” Sailaja modelled as well to “pay the bills, because we were young and broke”. It was, in fact, while watching her on the runway for Pierre Cardin one balmy night in Mumbai that the muse struck him. That, and a conversation with her where she said: “I see all these beautiful things made abroad, and they’re not available to Indians in India. Why are we only shopping on fashion streets for export rejects, with all our best produce going abroad?”
The concept of Ensemble dawned—but so did Tahiliani’s realisation that he, a business school grad, needed to learn to sketch, cut and sew. “When I went back to FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology, New York], it was an ‘Oh my God!’ moment. I’d be on Seventh Avenue, in the middle of the garment district of New York, and there were shows happening all around you.” He recalls watching Donna Karan starting to become the star she is, or the hold Chanel had on the zeitgeist. And the need to create that kind of wearable art himself quickened in his blood. It wasn’t easy to explain. “My father was having a heart attack. He thought I was becoming a tailor, after going to Wharton. But by this time I was independent. I wasn’t asking for permission or handouts. He didn’t have to pay for it.”
Every part of that early journey was an evolution—from becoming one of the founding fathers of the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) in 1999, to becoming one of the first Indian designers to show at Milan Fashion Week (2003), to the global visibility that came with Paris Hilton, Victoria Beckham, Gigi Hadid, Karlie Kloss, Lady Gaga, Oprah and Zendaya wearing his myriad iterations of draped saris on the red carpet through the 2010s and ’20s.
These fortuitous moments garnered enough momentum to cement his brand, with flagships in five major Indian cities today. “None of it was planned,” he insists. “We also had no idea what we were doing. There was no concept of a design industry in India. We created more textiles than design, and I had no real frame of reference.”
But anyone who’s talked shop with Tahiliani soon realises he doesn’t need one. He is always scouring the world for its drapes, its colours, its fabrics and their movement. And he leaves his air-conditioned ateliers (“Let me tell you, they weren’t, when we started”) constantly to find them, in the bylanes of Kutch, Varanasi or Lucknow—wherever drapes and folds may live and evolve. “People think Indian design is synonymous with embellishment. They feel the need to lace it through their couture—” He cuts himself off mid-sentence to point out a group of colourful pedestrians crossing the street from the window of his car, fascinated by the drape of a dupatta that everyone else blinks and misses.
When we try, together, to place what his secret sauce has been—the thing that’s created a band of loyal Tahiliani lovers that have stayed the course for three decades—it comes back to one thing. The brand is Indian in its very bones, enhanced not by heavy embellishment or embroidery, but by the drape—the foremost expression of that Indianness, existing in unique ways across the country.
The proof of Tahiliani’s success is in his myriad ventures—co-creating occasion-focused menswear brand Tasva with ABFRL, his first luxury prêt line OTT and, most recently, his fine jewellery line TT Tijori.
It is why, as he sets up for the show that is an homage to those 30 years, he is more excited than anxious. “My favourite moments of a show are watching the first 10 or 15 models go out on the runway. There is so much work that goes into that moment. But as the first models take the stage, it feels like releasing a dove into the sky. My work is done—it’s out in the universe now, ready to be received.”
Tahiliani’s shows, invariably a spectacle, have often been overrun by eager audiences; “I’ve had 1,400 people come for a show meant for 600, with us having to turn people away because it was a fire hazard,” he reminisces, about his India Couture Week show in August 2024. “I spent the next several days sending apology flowers,” he smiles. Eventually, he even did an encore show.
The 30-year showcase, however, is prepared for grand scale. It will be held at the British Residency in Hyderabad, a structure “whose style is British, but whose soul is unmistakably Indian—not a foreign imposition”, Tahiliani says. “It stands at the intersection of two worlds that have shaped the way I think, feel and design.”
The show is inspired, in part, by William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, premised on the under-the-radar romance between Madras Army officer James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair-un-Nissa, a noblewoman from Hyderabad’s Shia elite. It also celebrates the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity, “the alchemy of the East and the West”. “We are layered. We are fusion. We are contradiction,” Tahiliani writes. “And in that contradiction lies our strength.”
As he hits the three-decade mark, Tahiliani claims he’s never once encountered designer’s block. “It’s the opposite, in fact, having to pare down ideas from the ones that come to mind. Inspiration is infinite when the source of it is India. It always has—and always will have—an infinity to offer.”
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